Yahoo announced its plans to renovate its homepage design starting on Thursday, September 18th.  Yahoo is reportedly the most heavily trafficked site on the Internet, and will have many expectations to live up to.  Nevertheless, the new Yahoo homepage features are tailored to the user.  The new homepage will have a tab on the left hand column links to the user’s favorite sites, similar to that of bookmarks, link bars or browser tabs. Additionally, once users sign into Yahoo, they can preview other sites while remaining on the homepage.  Yahoo will test the new homepage on a small group of users, before the complete overhaul.

Although a personalized homepage is a great way to keep users coming back to Yahoo, many wonder how long it will take Yahoo to complete its redesign and have it go live. Yahoo is being careful with its complete overhaul. After all, site redesigns can either bring forth great success, or might upset users. Such continues to be the case for social network giant, Facebook.  How long will the wait be for the new Yahoo, and how will users react?

Yahoo has introduced a new web service platform, which attempts to raise competition for search engine giant, Google. Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), will give web developers access to Yahoo’s search technology. Sources also state, “sites and services will be able to combine Yahoo’s search results with their own data sources and control both the ranking and the presentation of search results on their sites”.

How can this change the search engine industry, and how will Yahoo! benefit? Yahoo will enable smaller search engines to make a larger splash in the industry, thus opening the opportunity for more competition. Yahoo will benefit through ads. In exchange for using BOSS, the search engines will be required to run Yahoo ads on search results pages. Will Yahoo’s attempts make a difference in Google’s dominance? Only the future will determine the power of BOSS.

Sites created in flash have been a problem for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), in that search engines like Google and Yahoo! do not recognize them. However, recent news state that Adobe has collaborated with Google and Yahoo!, and found a way to index flash sites, making them viewable to search engines.

Google explains that the new ability to search through flash works intuitively. That is to say, Google’s algorithm reads flash sites the same way in which users click through a site, remembering its text. This is facilitated through Adobe’s integration of a new searchable SWF library. However, other media within flash sites such as images cannot yet be indexed. Nevertheless, Adobe continues to make strides in the right direction towards making flash sites available through search engines like Google and Yahoo! With this progress made, the future may be bright for flash.

Not to be outdone by Microsoft and Google, Yahoo! also made a deal to partner up with another company in order to reach a wider audience with their toolbar. Unlike Google and Microsoft, however, this deal is not from a computer company. Yahoo! has partnered with Acresso Software, which makes the largely used InstallShield.

According to reports, the Yahoo! toolbar is the first add-on in Acresso’s new initiative to provide add-on services when making software updates and installations. Furthermore, InstallShield is said to be used by about 71,000 organizations. Many of their customers include: Microsoft, SAS, BMC and IBM (among others), which will definitely be of an advantage to Yahoo!